


Quiet Acts

by North_of_Kyrimorut



Series: Foxiyo Week 2020 [7]
Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars: Rebels, Star Wars: The Clone Wars (2008) - All Media Types
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, F/M, Fix-It, Fix-It of Sorts, Happily Ever After, Hopeful Ending, I mean it's, Pre-Rogue One, Rebel Fox, Rebel Riyo, Slice of Life, Star Wars: Rebels References, nonchronological
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-04
Updated: 2021-01-04
Packaged: 2021-03-14 04:49:08
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,573
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28539864
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/North_of_Kyrimorut/pseuds/North_of_Kyrimorut
Summary: Sometimes, it's the quiet acts of rebellion that help build the future. Luckily, those are the ones Riyo is best at.Foxiyo Week 2020 - Fearless: courageous, heroic, cocky
Relationships: Riyo Chuchi/CC-1010 | Fox
Series: Foxiyo Week 2020 [7]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2077149
Comments: 3
Kudos: 31





	Quiet Acts

**Author's Note:**

> So, that was fun! I still have no idea why I thought it was a good idea, but it was fun! I really appreciate all the kudos and comments along the way. Based on that, it looks like [Phases](https://archiveofourown.org/works/28364478) ranks as the overall favorite, which both delighted and surprised me. That was one story that yanked the pen from me and ran, and I so glad it was enjoyed. Personally, I have to say it’s a tossup between [The Abnormal State](https://archiveofourown.org/works/28366440) and [The Good Soldier](https://archiveofourown.org/works/28506978) because, apparently, I just love a little bit of twisty with my Fox. 
> 
> Without further ado, let’s see how close of a happy ending I can scrape together for these two…

Riyo Chuchi was dead.

Less than a year after the founding of the Empire, she boarded a transport on Alderaan bound for the Outer Rim. She switched ships at a waystation on the Perlemian Route and it was that vessel that met an unceremonious end when its hyperdrive malfunctioned _just_ as they crossed an unexpected minor gravity well. All hands were lost with the ship.

At the same time as that unfortunate ship and its passengers met their untimely demise, a slight, blue-skinned woman with a Wroonian chain code (reissued from the Embassy of Wroona in Alderaan’s capitol city of Aldera after an accident with a scanner left the original unreadable) hopped on a transport bound in the diametric direction, accompanied by a tall human male who seemed to have the most nondescript face in the universe.

The same day the news reached the Core and a few holonews outlets ran the footnote _Former Pantoran Senator Dead in Tragic Accident,_ the unremarkable couple spent an afternoon in a quiet inn on a quiet Mid Rim world. They used their time cobbling together something meaningful from the old Pantoran _Rites of the Goddess_ and translated Mandalorian vows _(we are one and share everything.)_ Satisfied at last, they bound their lives together with words that held no legality in any sector of the Empire but were utterly inviolable between the two of them. They ate ryshcate and got on with their lives.

Overall, Riyo Chuchi was very glad to be dead. It was terrifying, but it was worth it. It was her first true act of rebellion, quiet as it was.

* * *

“New Moon, _are you receiving?_ ”

Riyo Chuchi—who only seldom went by her first name and never by her clan name anymore— reached over and hit the subspace transceiver. The miniature holoprojector sprang to life with a familiar symbol. “We’re receiving, Fulcrum. Go ahead.”

“ _Transmitting data stream,_ ” the distorted voice said. “ _New contact codes for the next rotation._ ”

Riyo caught the stream in the buffer and directed it to a subroutine. Fox would decrypt it later. “Copy that. Just came back from a run to Dac. There seemed to be a lot of activity next door in the Lothal sector.”

Fulcrum’s line was silent, save for the crackle of the distorter. “ _Don’t concern yourself with Lothal just now. I heard your spouse had a little run in with some overzealous customs security. Is he recovered?_ ”

“Mostly,” Riyo said, thinking that ‘little run in’ was maybe an understatement for the vibroblade to the gut Fox had taken. “Too fearless for his own good and bored out of his skull on bedrest.”

The next crackle might have been a laugh. “ _They’re all like that, aren’t they? When he’s fighting fit, establish contact. I have an assignment. It requires a, ah,_ familiar _face._ ”

“He has one of those,” Riyo replied, as neutrally as possible.

“ _I tried to get ahold of an old friend,_ ” Fulcrum continued. It was unusually chatty for them, and Riyo had a sudden vision of the face on the other side of the transmitter. They had not seen one another for years, had not spoken each other’s names in almost as long, but Riyo still remembered Ahsoka Tano and she suspected she knew who her ‘old friend with a familiar face’ was. “ _But he’s lying low, I reckon._ ”

Riyo smiled, even though the channel only picked up audio. “As we all try to do. I’ll relay the message, and reach out soon.” She half-expected, half-hoped for a few more friendly words. They didn’t come.

“ _Fulcrum out._ ”

Riyo paused for a few moments, staring at the void holoprojector and remembering a life long gone. They had been so _young_ , so convinced that what was right and just would carry the day. They had both been in for an unpleasant education. She transferred the coded subroutine onto a datapad and pushed out of the pilot’s chair. _New Moon_ was a small ship, but it had been her most frequent home over the past dozen years. She knew every creak and shudder of the ship in flight, and just now everything was quiet and smooth.

Thank the Goddess for small mercies.

With experienced hands, she slid down the short ladder led to the living quarters beneath most of the cargo hold. It had been murder getting Fox down here when he was first injured, and as it was he was more or less confined to the smaller area. She wondered if they would eventually new to trade in for single-decked ship, but left that thought for another day. She pushed open the privacy screen that separated their bed from the rest of the space, and took a moment to gauge how he was doing.

He was propped up, reading a flimsi-sheet book they picked up at some random flea market on some random planet. A groove of pain had settled in between his brows, and Riyo desperately wishes she could smooth it away. It was sticking there more and more in recent years.

It was too much to think about that, as well. She had been as relentless in her quest to find a solution to his accelerated aging as he had been reticent. He went along with her schemes with the equanimity of a man who had never questioned that he was meant to die young and with a blaster in his hand. Her heart had been broken when their best opportunity— whispers of an honest-to-Force gene fix engineered specifically for Fett clones— were truncated by the Purge on Mandalore. She wasn’t sure if any of the ramshackle treatments she had prompted him to undergo had done much good. He was twenty six now and looked— well, like a very active, very healthy middle-aged old human might. Riyo had more than a decade on him and would live through as many years at least twice more.

That she would spend most of them without Fox was an unbearable reality that had no place in their cozy nest, and so she pushed it away.

“You’ve been standing there for quite a while,” Fox flipped a page. “I can only conclude that you like the view.”

Riyo grinned and closed the distance, kicking off her boots and rolling onto bed next to him. He closed the book and half-turned to better face her. Every day, there was more grey spreading out from his temples, deeper lines settling by his dark eyes.

If Riyo had been asked as a young woman if she thought the average, workaday human was attractive, she would have answered honestly—not particularly. But she had half-fallen for Fox with his face hidden behind rigid angles of red and white plastoid bisected with a black t-visor, and by the time he had taken to regularly removing the old bucket around her, she would have loved him no matter what. Still, she was a _bit_ glad that there was so much to like about his looks, from the expressive dark brows to the slope of his nose to the strength of his shoulders. Time had taken none of those things from him.

But that didn’t mean should would give him that satisfaction of saying so just then.

“Transmission from Fulcrum.”

His brows became very expressive indeed. “Which one?”

She laughed and handed over the datapad. “Don’t worry; the one you like.” Another eloquent quirk of his brow, but he set on decrypting the codes with the ferocity of a starving man at a banquet. She hadn’t exaggerated his boredom. “She also wanted us to make contact once you’re healed. Op in need of a familiar face, she said.”

He snorted. “Wonder how much longer that’ll be useful. There, you can upload these.”

“I will,” she said, and set the datapad aside before snuggling into the bed a little more. “But I thought I should help you with your PT first.”

No more of his sharp rejoinders. Fox simply laughed and obliged her by getting on with his exercises.

* * *

It was a curious life they led together. For his part, Fox had come out of his role as Commander of the Coruscant Guards with a startling breadth and depth of criminal knowledge. He applied it all to work for them. Her hard-earned senatorial wages somehow disappeared from the banking systems after her reported death, and Fox laundered them as assiduously as the most stained blood money. Their erratic itineraries used and skirted security protocols as necessary, and their records were as meticulous as only doctored books could be. Even the handful of falsified infractions against their chain codes—a few minor flight violations, a twenty-year-old drunk and disorderly for Fox— were carefully curated to be perfectly imperfect.

Their world was small even if their travels were wide. Riyo hardly had occasion to miss her name, since Fox still used it, and Fox was the person she spoke to the most.

Their world did not expand much, even when they truly entered the rebellion. Riyo could have named names, but she never did, and she and Fox worked in a vacuum.

 _Standard cell procedure,_ he said with a shrug. _Smart, if we ever face interrogation._

Not that Fox would have ever allowed for such a thing. Their roles were deliberately small, and Fox insisted they kept to Riyo’s pace rather than rely on his abilities as a solider engineered and perfected. It was mostly courier work, discreetly picking up and dropping off data cylinders along their way. And if things grew a little heated? Well, Riyo could still doubletalk with the best of career politicians, and Fox’s emergency exit strategies were artistic masterpieces.

Their contributions to the effort may have been trivial in the grand scheme of things. But Riyo sometimes suspected that their greatest rebellion was the quiet evenings on their ship, when she would read her old law school texts aloud while Fox coerced seedlings to grow under sunlamps. That was a rebellion that could last forever, as far as Riyo was concerned.

* * *

It had become habit for Riyo not to think of the names of the old friends that she now only kept contact with through layers of encryption and secrecy. Ahsoka, meting out seemingly minor tasks that Riyo just _knew_ pointed to some greater goal. Bail, whose resources never seemed to run dry and now included that spitfire daughter of his riling up the remains of the Senate. And then there was Mon, who had measured her steps so carefully but now seemed on the verge of stepping over fully to the side of the rebels. For the sake of safety and for the hope of better rebellions to come, Riyo did not see them, did not speak to them as themselves, but took comfort in knowing they were there—that they were all fighting the same fight.

But at this particular moment, Riyo cursed them all to the five Pantoran Voids, as well as the Corellian Hell in Fox’s behalf for good measure. She cursed herself most of all, for thinking she had any place in this unending ideological war and for dragging Fox into it with her.

The first time—the very first time—Fox had finally consented to taking on an operation that was tailored to his abilities and not Riyo’s—

He had missed their rendezvous by almost a full day cycle.

She dithered as she went through the delay protocols they had set up years ago and seldom used—a program that would simulate a minor mechanical malfunction that she could flag and forward to whatever port authority they were docked with, buying a little extra time. She went into the engine room and got hyperdrive fluid on her hands for good measure and prayed that the additional half-day she had been permitted to idle would be enough.

The hours passed by with agonizing slowness, and then time suddenly snapped into a fast-forward when she heard the hatch hiss open. She willed herself to stay calm through the blinding fear. And she did, even when faced with the stormtrooper standing in her cargo hold.

She brushed back her hair in a nervous gesture and smudged hyperdrive coolant on her cheek where her clan tattoos used to be. “Can I help you, trooper?...”

The hatch closed, the helmet came off, and she nearly sobbed in relief.

“I flickered out the security cams on my way in,” he said, pausing only briefly for a tight embrace. “You sent up a delay request for our departure?”

“Yes,” she said, blinking back tears, and taking strength from his coolness. “Engine trouble.”

“Give an update and say we’ll clear out in an hour.”

“That long?” Her hands trembled even as she tapped out the message.

“We can depart earlier,” he said reassuringly. “Let’s just stagger the timetables as much as possible.”

“What about the armor? Do we need to drop it?”

He shook his head. “Fried it with a targeted EMP before I even got onto base. No loss. Sithspitting awful HUD.”

Riyo laughed, a mixture of nostalgia for the Fox she first met and loved and potent relief that he was back safe with her. Well, safe as could be, still sitting on a landing pad with a cache of stolen data that had been important enough for Fulcrum to overcome her (understandable) wariness of Fox. She launched out of the pilot’s seat and latched on to Fox, poky plastoid be damned. When she managed to pull back enough to look at him, he grinned. It cut across his face so suddenly and so brilliantly that it left Riyo blinking away stardust. She loved his regular, crooked half-smile but this—this transformed him and for a moment that he looked half his age.

She pulled back a little further and swatted at his cuirass. It had carbon scouring on it. “You enjoyed that!”

By now he was also laughing, and he leaned in to touch his forehead to hers for just a moment. “Oh, yes.”

* * *

Riyo Chuchi was dead. And, like all dead women, she felt no fear. It wasn’t just the security of Fox’s arms around her or that their little two-man cell now had a home in the Alliance to Restore the Republic that had banished all traces of it from her heart. It wasn’t that Riyo could now use her old friends’ names from time to time, or that Fox had a chance to compare scars with a handful of his brothers (even if he did complain, _of course it was Rex who made it—and that karking Delta.)_

It wasn’t that the fight had become easier. The Empire was deadlier than ever, an agitated predator with tearing teeth.

Rather, it was something that she had started to find in herself somewhere in orbit around Orto Plutonia. It had grown with Fox’s steady hands always ready to catch her and with a cause to believe in. It flourished now, in the dark of the ship she thought of as home, measured by Fox’s sleeping exhales.

Call it love, call it hope, call it heroism. Call it life, and be done. She rested her hands softly across her stomach, and let the sound of Fox’s breath lull her to sleep. One day, her dreams would come true. She would make sure of it—for herself, for Fox, and for their family.

After all, life was the quietest act of rebellion of all.


End file.
